Her grievances had grown monstrous; her heart was bursting with them. Sometimes, when she lay awake at night, she thought that the only good thing in the world would be to “get even” with him.
But Mr. Pirini was safe as an immortal god from her vengeance. There was no conceivable way in which she could hurt him. She couldn’t retaliate by making unpleasant remarks about his personal appearance, because they both knew that he was superb. She could not shame him by reminding him of all she had done for him—she had tried that once. She couldn’t even tell any one of her own generosity and[Pg 220] his vile ingratitude. On the contrary, she felt obliged to lie quite wildly. When she bought anything new, she pretended that Louis had given it to her. When they went out together, she pretended that it was his treat.
“And he just stands there grinning!” she thought. “All I’ve done for him, and look how he acts! Look at last Sunday, down to Coney, when we met Sadie. She’s seen me and Louis going together nearly a year. It was perfectly natural for her to say was him and me going to get married; and what did he up and say, after all I’ve done for him? ‘Sure we are,’ he says, ‘when hell freezes over!’ I’d just like to have told Sadie a thing or two about him!”
Unattainable consolation! She couldn’t ever tell any one, for nobody would understand. She did not even care to bring the matter to the attention of God prematurely, for she feared He would not consider all the evidence, but would give a judgment based upon one or two salient facts; and the facts were somehow so insignificant, compared with her feelings.
Twelve minutes, now, before the next boat. A sort of panic seized her. He mustn’t come and discover her walking up and down like this, as if she were impatient, as if she were eagerly waiting for him. No—she would be found reading something with profound interest, unconscious of the passing of time, of the waste of this Saturday afternoon, so precious to her after a week’s work in the factory.
She sauntered up to the news stand and fluttered over the pages of a magazine. She thought it was “high-class,” and yet it was full of pictures. She paid for it, and sat down on a bench.
“Well, I read a lot of good things in school,” she reflected, always on the defensive. “‘Hiawatha,’ and all that. I was real good in English.”
She turned to an article on Turkey, a country which she thought immoral and interesting, but it was difficult to divert her attention from her feet. Funny, the way they hurt more when you were sitting down than when you were walking!
“Maybe I might have took a half a size longer,” she reflected. “Well, anyways! This shiny paper kind of hurts my eyes. It’s an awful foolish thing to wear glasses—makes you look so much older; only they do say it gives you wrinkles to squint.”
Wistfully she looked at the photograph of a group of Turkish beauties. Certainly they were all stout, but somehow it was a different sort of stoutness; and their eyes, their languorous, ardent eyes.